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Four No​-​Input Field Recordings

by Seth Cooke

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1.
CERO I 05:00
2.
CERO II 05:00
3.
CERO III 05:00
4.
CERO IV 05:00

about

No-input field recordings, normalised.

Reviews...

"Harsh and alienating white-noise... the construction of the music is completely impenetrable, and nothing is revealed about its origins or methodology. Brutal." The Sound Projector

"Field recording is of course a sonic act: a technological progression from written accounts and orality that documents and describes events. Technological advances allowed recordings of acoustic events, which at first were meant to solve the problem of subjectivity. However, field recording only further complicated matters of documentation by presenting media that was still highly subjective (according to audio editing and microphone placement) as objective source material. This encouraged sound artists to create works that elucidate the presence of the recorder and recordist. One example is Seth Cooke’s Four No-Input Field Recordings. Released on the aptly titled online imprint Every Contact Leaves a Trace, Cooke’s recordings were made in Bristol and Portishead over the course of a year. In listening, the locations could be taken to be seemingly meaningless, or too heavily veiled by the distortion of the preamplifiers to be heard at all. However, the microphone preamps pick up radio frequencies and other wireless signals that cannot be heard by the naked ear alone, revealing a sense of place captured only in the unique conditions Cooke has exhibited through the recorder. This frequency pickup also reveals the ways in which all recordings leave a technological trace." Ely Rosenblum, 'Auditory Ethics', Centre for Imaginative Ethnography

"Seth Cooke serves up four five-minute slices of squally static. Strange whimpering seeps out from the whippy atmospherics of his no-input field recordings." Wire

"You might, given the amusing title, expect Seth’s Four No-Input Field Recordings to be very, very quiet indeed. Instead what we have is twenty minutes of electrostatic roar uplit with digi-squiggles. I imagine Seth shrunk, with his boom mic and recording equipment, Fantastic Voyage style, and squirted into his kit in order to become the Chris Watson of the sub-atomic. Listen as herds of crackling electrons stampede along the canyon floor of his mixer’s circuitry. Marvel at the call-and-response of a quantum-level dawn chorus before us clumsy humans start collapsing the wave function all over the place with our observations. Very sharp and very entertaining." radio free midwich

"Now, concept-speak: ostensibly, this could so easily have been a jokey convolution of two avant-tropes. No-input recordings have been doing the rounds a while now – it’s probably more than a decade since Toshimaru Nakamura got us excited by the prospect of letting gear do funny things to itself. I suspect there’s an appeal to things which live between automatons and minimal agency, though it seems to me like the mutation of self-generating feedback loops is closer to orthodox instrumentality than the initial liberation seemed. Field recordings are… frankly, I’ve rarely not found field recordings dull as piss. You stuck a microphone in a field and you’re self-satisfied. Fuck off. It frustrates me because it’s very rarely done with the elegance and affection (and sadly, expensive gear) that Chris Watson does it with. In terms of music, as with visual art, I’m not interested in flat representation – I want magic and blood, not wedding photographers. That’s not what Seth’s done here. The basic premise is simple – it’s no-input field recordings. The tracks are all called CERO which rudimentary searching tells me transliterates to “empty disasters,” which is either a joke or a nod to their genesis. A recording device not recording the space they’re in but actively being affected by wherever they are. These are still field recordings – and my diatribe against field recordings works here – because the environment has oblique, episodic affects upon the recording which are by no means traceable to their place by evocation or representation but by effect. Wherein “every contact leaves a trace” approaches the force of manifesto. Note, these aren’t impossibly discrete pieces of minimal gesture or motion – each environment has an astonishing effect upon the no-input recordings. For “CERO III” whatever agency or ghost is tweaking the mic’s guts produces something like a c. 1990 hoover synth stuck in a particularly dusty vacuum cleaner. In a blind-test, devolved from the concept, you might mistake these for noise records but there’s a great deal of giving accidents their textural space – agency is afforded to the location and I gather there’s been some careful selection to the extent that the complexity of the textures leaves moments of formidable… luck, I suppose. “CERO IV” has a sound not dissimilar to the sort of spectral massed brass Horatiu Radulescu articulated. “Luck” is a misleading term, because it’s quite clear that Seth isn’t someone to let weak stuff out – arguments over agency be damned, these are seriously compelling recordings." Freq

"Four delicious slices of noise of identical duration... the sparse production notes printed on the small sheet of transparency included within the elaborate packaging claim the work was recorded and edited over the course of a year, from October 2012 to October 2013. The pieces sound like they could be derived from the sort of interference you would get between channels on analogue television receivers in “the old days”, but I suspect Cooke would be offended by such an assumption as I’m sure there is a lot more going on despite the strangely un-credible title Four No Input Field Recordings – an oxymoron, surely? Or just a rare, (and welcome), case of an “experimental” musician with a sense of humour? There is a great deal of development from track to track for those who listen closely, and a wealth of detail within the, at first, seemingly impenetrable fizz. This has the result that the dark energy contained within the music coalesces inside the part of your brain that processes disquiet and enables you to relax fully." Honest Music For Dishonest Times

credits

released January 20, 2014

Recorded and edited by Seth Cooke in Bristol and Portishead, October 2012 to October 2013

Originally released on Every Contact Leaves a Trace on 20th January 2014.

www.everycontactleavesatrace.net/2013/10/21/four-no-input-field-recordings/

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tags

about

Seth Cooke Bristol, UK

filling noise with space

artefacts and artifice

live performances involving feedback & resonance

occasional drums & electronics

other projects:
Dominic Lash & Seth Cooke (duo)
Every Contact Leaves a Trace (label)

past projects:
Hunting Lodge
Defibrillators
Bang the Bore

full details via google drive link below
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